


Contradictions

by starraya



Category: Peaky Blinders
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-05 01:42:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,301
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20480852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starraya/pseuds/starraya
Summary: A character study of Polly during Series Three.





	Contradictions

Polly cannot sleep. Here she is, in this big house, all hers, all legal. Here she is in this respectable neighbourhood where drunkards do not yell in the early hours of the mornings and the wails of sickly infants do not pierce through thin walls.

Sitting up in bed, Polly knocks back glass after glass of whiskey. She wants it to block out the voice. You have sinned, the voice inside her head tells her. You have murdered. She can’t bring herself to pray. The whiskey disappears quickly. She rises out of bed. Reaches for a case of cigarettes and lights one. She stands in the centre of her room and smokes. She has risen and returned to bed countless times. 

She cannot pray for forgiveness because she does not feel guilt for murdering the copper. He was a bad man. He hurt her. Afterwards, she had scrubbed and scrubbed at her body until her skin burned red. She looked down at her arms and they seemed like they were the arms of someone else.

The copper’s life is not the first life she has taken. The first time was years ago. It was her own flesh. She was sixteen. She threw herself down the stairs. On the floor, bruised and sore, Polly fought back tears. How many times had she wished her brothers and sisters, once their little lungs had squeezed out their last breath and their heavy eyes had closed one last time, to wake up, and breathe, and live? But she wanted this baby dead.

Her father found her at the foot of the stairs and called a doctor they couldn’t afford. When Polly and the doctor were alone together, he offered to waiver the fee, for something in return. He had known. He had felt her stomach roughly, even though Polly had told him that it was only her head she had knocked. He hadn’t said anything, but he’d given her a look of disgust. She’d resisted the urge to spit at him.

“A miraculous fall,” the doctor told her father. The doctor’s eyes glinted sharp as the knife Polly had recently begun to keep in her boot. She had fantasies at night about running the knife across the cheek of the boy who’d made her all those promises and then fled as soon as he got what he wanted.

That night, she sat in the bathtub and gripped the edge until her arms trembled. Her tears spilled into the water and mixed with the blood there. All that blood. All that shame. She thought the baby would kill her. She burnt the bloody, ruined nightgown. The following Sunday she had gone to church alone and lit a candle for her unnamed child. It was a sin to take a life. Only God could do that. Had she condemned two souls? For where did unborn souls go? Unwanted souls, from unmarried mothers and absent fathers? But what life would a bastard have? Could the taking of a life ever be just?

Murderer, murderer, the voice inside her head says. The voice keeps her awake the entire night. The voice sends her drunkenly stumbling into church the next morning, demanding confession.

-

They make love for a second time on the floor, slowly, underneath the impervious watch of her portrait. Afterwards, they lie side by side. She turns on her side to face him and places her hand on his chest, feeling his heartbeat. She smiles at him, a mix of contentment and wickedness sparkling in her eyes. “Pleased?”

“Well,” he starts. “I can’t speak for God, but – ”

“How the fuck did that get there?” Polly sits up and inspects her the skin of her arm. There is paint on it. She laughs. “Next time we do it in a bed.”

-

Polly opens the door to a grinning Ada.

“So, where is it?” Ada clasps her hands together.

“I had it hung in here,” Polly leads her through to the office. She waits for Ada’s judgement. Polly feels a strange feeling washing over her. Ruben and her are the only ones who have seen the portrait; perhaps the feeling is one of self-consciousness, or a feeling of attachment. Why should she feel nervous, though? There are plenty who will be passing through and see it; she had had it painted – chose the dress – with that in mind.

“Oh, Polly,” Ada gasps, “it’s beautiful.”

“It’s not too –”

“It’s lovely.” All the boys are out and the business is closed for the day. Ada’s voice drops low. “And did you. . .?

Polly nods.

“So, come on, Pol. What’s he like? Is he nice to you? Is he rich? Is he from a good, respectable, Christian family?”

Polly laughs. Next Ada will be asking whether he will marry her if he gets her with child. Which, thank God, is very much off the cards.

“He’s . . . well . . . “ Kind and gentle, are the first two words that cross her mind. The third is persistent. Not quite patient. Polly remembers their conversation about her vow never to sleep with another man. How he walked up her, all but closed the distance between them. His fingers had held her chin for only a second, tilting it slightly, softly but once he had returned to the painting, she could feel his touch still burning on her skin. She had swallowed. Straightened her back. And felt something, a lot like desire, sweep through her bloodstream quick as lighting a match, at once welcome and unwelcome, familiar and unfamiliar. She was unable to stop it growing like she had many times before, standing right there, watching him watching her. Imperviously keeping her vow, as he had said. It hadn’t been a vow though, but a fear – something far more unbreakable.

“Polly Gray lost for words. That’s a first.” Ada’s teasing tone pulls Polly out her reverie. “But, truly Pol, tell me all. I know you’ve been going out more for drives, not just on Sundays.” Ada’s eyes are bright and wide, imploring her to talk.

“Not here,” Polly says. “The walls have ears.”

-

Ruben wakes up and sees that it is still night. Polly is standing at the window. She has opened the window and pulled the curtains apart. Her figure is half-cloaked in moonlight, half in shadow. He can smell the cigarette smoke that she blows away in the night air.

She senses that he is watching her. “There’s not a star in the sky,” she says. “There are too many clouds.”

He wonders whether she has been to sleep at all. “Can’t sleep?”

“Sometimes,” she says. She knows that it is not a proper answer even if it is a true one. She shuts the window and draws the curtains. “It’s too quiet.”

“Is it not quiet where you live?” He means the house Tommy brought her, not Watery Lane.

“Yes and no.” She pads over to the bed. “At least not when I have Karl or Charlie.”

He can make out a small smile on her lips, and he returns one. He knows her great-nephews are like her grandchildren. He knows family is everything to her. And from all their conversations while he was painting her, he knows that she is a mother as much as an aunt to her four nephews. It is always mothers that bear the greatest of the family’s troubles.

Polly climbs back into bed. She should try to sleep. Ruben is taking her out to the opera tomorrow. Just ask him the bloody question and stop worrying, she tells herself.

“We’re opening the Grace Shelby Institute next week,” she tells Ruben. “Will you come?”

He agrees and she’s glad. But she still can’t fall asleep the entire night. She worries about Michael. If her son fires that bullet at the priest, Polly will bring the whole fucking company around Tommy’s ears. She knows Michael wants the kind of closure only vengeance can bring. It is an exchange of power, in a way. Tables turned. Blood for blood. A balancing of the book.

She will not let her son become a murderer, though, not as long as she lives.

-

Polly decides she fucking hates opera. Opera is nothing like the playhouses she went to when she was a teenager. No jostling or jeering, no clambering or clapping. No reek of ale and sweat, no threadbare and discoloured fabric on the seats, no cigarette stubs littering sticky floors. The entertainment there was never dull.

With opera, the audience sit like wooden dummies, stitched into their beautiful silk dresses and tailored suits, perfectly poised, eyes fixed on the stage, listening to the endless wails on stage. Polly feels as if she has missed a joke. Everyone around her looks entranced. What a waste, she thinks, to dress up in their finery, only to sit there all night enclosed in the shadows. Then and again, there is the rustle of fans or a half-suppressed cough. But always, there is the endless wails of the singers.

Polly remembers the crowds in the less respectable theatres she had sometimes been a part of, clapping and laughing along, swept along by the shared exhilaration, her cheeks flushed, a smile never leaving her lips. Opera is slow and needlessly drawn out, she thinks. She is glad when she hears rain beat down on the roof, heavier and heavier. Some other noise to distract her. A reminder that the weather, like her, does not care at all for this show.

There is a crack of thunder. On stage, the female opera singer lifts a hand to her forehead. Betrayal pains her features. She drives a knife though her partner’s heart. Polly shifts in her seat. It is hot in the theatre and the heat becomes too much. Sweat breaks at the back of her neck. Needing to find cooler air, Polly stands up.

Ruben reaches for her hand. He fears she might faint. Women do, having rose abruptly after sitting for a long period in hot weather. Polly squeezes his hand and shakes her head. The thunder outside roars. The female singer’s voice warbles precariously high. Polly tries to convey in the darkness that she is fine and he doesn’t need to follow her outside. But he does.

“The noise,” she lies, “it’s driving me mad.”

-

They enter his apartment laughing, even though their clothes drip with rain.

“Nothing like and English summer,” Ruben says as he shuts the door.

“At least the storm drowned out most of the singing,” Polly says.

“You didn’t care for it.” He takes off his hat and coat.

“I said I’d try it and now I have.” She slips off her gloves and coat.

“Next time,” he says, taking the gloves and coat from her, “I promise we shall go somewhere you like.”

“Somewhere I like,” she muses. She opens a drawer where she knows there are cigarettes and matches. He rarely smokes. He brought them for her. He had teased her once that he wouldn’t like to get on the wrong side of her if she wanted a smoke but had run out of cigarettes. She had told him, trying not to feel his words as if there were a jibe at her, but rather a jest between friends, that he wouldn’t want to

Sometimes his words sting her. They’re never sharp words and they’ve never meant to barb her. But sometimes she feels a strange, faint sting. The kind that ghosts your skin when you have brushed past nettles, but the itch has not yet fully-flamed. Sometimes his charming words remind her that her own accent could never flow so smooth.

They were born in different worlds.

What the fuck is she doing with him, she sometimes thinks. But when she thinks that she thinks back to the night she saw the finished portrait. She thinks back to how he had waited for her to turn and kiss him for the first time and how his hand had wound around her waist, how they crept higher and higher up her back before his fingers brushed the tiny oval of exposed skin just below the button of her dress.

What she is doing is having fun, Polly tells herself. She lights herself a cigarette. So fucking what if she hates the music he likes and word association and opera? One day, soon, they will find something they both like. She doesn’t know what.

“Every pub in Birmingham and the Black Country is run in some way by the Peaky Blinders, or it not, our enemies,” she tells Ruben.

“A day out somewhere, then?” He suggests.

“I don’t like the races.”

“I thought races were the Shelby business.”

“It’s no fun when you know which ones are fixed.”

“The pictures, perhaps? Isn’t that where all the sweethearts go these days?”

She can’t help but smile at his use of the word sweethearts.

“Our Ada loves the pictures. Or she loves Rudolph Valentino. I can never be certain which. Actually, last week she told me of a play. Political. Controversial. Written by Oscar Wilde.”

“A Woman of No Importance?”

“That’s it. She said it was a comedy at the expense of the bourgeoise.”

“Then we simply must go and see it.”

-

You are dead, she wants to scream. You are in the dirt. You deserved it. She wants to spit at the figure approaching. She closes her eyes, starts to recite the bible. But he is still approaching. And there is the voice, murderer, murderer, murderer. It never stops. And she can hear the tap of his cane and smell his blood and feel his breath on her skin. She screams and wakes up.

“Polly?” She has woken Ruben up beside her. He turns on the light and sees that she is shaking.

“It’s nothing,” she says. She jumps out of bed and searches for her dress. A feeling of shame, of nakedness washes over her. She hates to think what she has said in her sleep. She pulls on the dress and flees into the next room. 

“Polly, don’t go.” Ruben follows her.

“I’m not mad,” she says. She pulls on her coat, even though it is still damp from the rain. Tears start to well in her eyes, but she won’t let them fall. I’m not mad, she tells herself. I’m not mad. I only hear a voice in my head every day. I only talk in my sleep. And scream.

“Polly, you don’t have to go. And you don’t have to explain.”

Polly stops buttoning her coat.

“Let me get you a cigarette.”

“And a drink,” she says. “Large.” She smiles a small, weak smile.

“And a drink,” he says.

She falls asleep that night in his arms, exhausted and he lies awake and wonders about the horror’s she has seen in her world.

-

You fool, she wants to scream. You fool. You fool. Why would an educated man of standing pursue a woman like you? Polly throws the knife on the floor and sinks to the ground. The woman in the expensive French dress is too sure of herself. She is not a woman of class and substance. She is a woman of shame and sin and she will never be anything more.

Polly runs up to the portrait, knife in hand. The blade slices through the woman’s shoulders, her throat, her face. She hacks and hacks. No part is special. What might have taken three Sundays, hours and hours of careful, laborious study to perfect takes seconds to destroy.

She stands back and marvels at the destruction. Why does it take so long to create things, but so little time to destroy them? A horrible laugh escapes her throat. Polly throws the knife on the floor.

As she sips another glass of whiskey, she hears a knock on the door.

It is easy to find a gun. Holding a gun is also the easier way to feel power. When Ruben walks in, she raises it to his forehead.

Polly offers him a glass of whiskey. He hesitates, aware that it is half a peace-offering, half an invitation. The boys are out on business, she tells him, lighting another cigarette. They won’t be back until dawn. It is one o’clock now. Ruben says yes to the drink. He can’t help but turn to look at the ruined portrait. He hears Polly close a drawer shut behind him – the gun he thinks, she has put it away, efficiently, discreetly, back to its usual resting place – and he is again reminded of the foreignness of the place in which he stands, the strange, indifferent surroundings.

He turns back around to her. Finds familiarity in the small smile dancing on her lips. Holding their glasses, she tilts her head to one side and directs him to a table.

They sit and drink in silence. When she visited him all those Sundays, stood in that dress, sometimes she felt held under a magnifying glass. Scrutinised. She supposes she should feel like an object of study right now. Afterall, he has never seen her here before, where she is at home. But she feels protected. Hidden within Small’s Heath’s smoke and shadows.

She feels strangely calm. The fact that the destruction of the portrait is irrevocable, that this night is already half-written, half-done, is a comfort to her. The Shelby’s are good at breaking things and she has picked up many of the pieces. Things are always clearer in the wake of destruction. She has agreed – she believes – that they have a life together. And he has agreed to paint a portrait of her in a dress she brought in a shop.

“Why do you seek me out at Thomas’s wedding?” Polly asks him.

He places his glass down on the table. Contemplates her question. “My answer is not so different from what I gave you when you asked me why I was painting you and it is, again, twofold.”

“Men. You can never give one straight answer.”

“Firstly, I had heard a little amount about you. I was interested in you. And then I saw you and I knew I must speak to you.” He remembers thinking how she seemed detached from the wedding celebrations, above them. “I could never seem to catch you.”

“What’s the second reason?” Polly takes a drag of her cigarette.

“A party always makes one feel terribly bold and, when you get to my age, one develops a certain carpe diem attitudes toward . . . these sort of things . . .” 

“Oh, so you did just want to sleep with me?” Polly smiles.

“Yes,” he admits, “but I also wanted to get to know you, to see you again, to paint you.”

“In that order?”

“I think the order it all fell into was good.”

Polly stubs out her cigarette. Purses her lips; the smile on them is tight and wicked. She puts down her glass. “Come back to mine,” she says.

-

Polly rises out of bed far too early for Ruben’s liking. Barefoot and bleary-eyed, in a dark green robe, she fumbles through her wardrobe for something to wear. She calls back to him as he lies watching her in her bed. She tells him there is a family meeting today; she wants to get there early, talk with Thomas first.

He knows any effort on his part to coax her back into bed would be futile. Where family business is concerned she is unswayable and he knows the need is a selfish one. She has promised to see him this Sunday; next Sunday he has promised to start the new painting. That had been earlier this morning when they had been in bed together, half-awake, half-asleep; she had leaned in and kissed him and told him that she was looking forward to it.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a bunch of writings I wrote in 2016. I wrote them before I studied creative writing so it might be shit.
> 
> But I love S3. And my God, whilst I love S5 Polly, I am not a fan of her “romance” with Gold and want Gold’s storyline to be over already.


End file.
